Christmas-Antoine Pluche

Christmas-Antoine Pluche , more known under name the abbot Pluche , born the November 13rd 1688 with Rheims, Saint-Hilaire parish and dead the November 19th 1761 with Game preserve-Saint-Maur, close Paris, is a priest French, famous for its Spectacle of nature , best-seller of Natural history.

Pluche, which would have been born in the street which bears its name today, was wire of a baker. Its native house, of which there remain some vestiges, occupied the angle of the Pluche streets and the Marc, current site of the public garden Charles Sarazin. He becomes professor of Rhétorique to Rheims. The bishop of Laon names it directing college of the city, posts that it accepts to escape the legal proceedings because of his opposition to the bubble Unigenitus from 1713.

He withdraws himself in 1749 with the Game preserve-Saint-Maur and dies of the continuations of a crisis of Apoplexie in 1761.

Its Spectacle of nature, or Talks on the characteristics of the Natural history which appeared most specific to make young people curious and to form the spirit to them appears for the first time in 1732 and will be represented in all the European languages and will know a very great number of more or less shortened adaptations. The repercussion of this book is incredible and one can, rightly, speech of best-seller. It will cause a great number of vocations of naturalist.

However, it is not a question strictly speaking of a scientific book but of a pleasant popularization covering on an alert and easy tone serious subjects. But it takes an active part in the diffusion of the taste for the scientific study at the 18th century. It is however far from reflecting " the spirit of Lumières" who will reign on " Large Encyclopédie" of Diderot and Alembert: the Pluche Abbot, on the subjects which he knows little about, refers to the Bible and laughs with the theories of Newton; for him, the Earth is 6000 years old, and God created Adam and Eve… If it were not that, one could almost make of it a predecessor of Louis Figuier, of which it with the curiosity of spirit for what touches with sciences and technology.

Its other publications show the diversity of its interests. He publishes in 1739, a Histoire of the sky considered according to the ideas of the poets, the philosophers and Brace, where one shows: 1° the origin of the poetic sky, 2° the mistake of the philosophers on the factory of the sky and the ground, 3° the conformity of the experiment with the only physics of Brace , in 1751, a De Linguarum artificio and doctrina , in 1764 Harmony of the geography of the différens ages , in 1775, a Letter on the Holy Bulb and the sacring of our Kings in Rheims .

Source

External bonds

Portrait
Works of Pluche digitized by the SICD of the universities of Strasbourg

Random links: